Divided They Tweet: The Network Structure of Political Microbloggers and Discussion Topics

Albert Feller, Matthias Kuhnert, Timm O. Sprenger, Isabell M. Welpe

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

48 Scopus citations

Abstract

In the context of a national election, this study explores more than 69,000 Twitter messages containing mentions of political parties and about 2,500 related user profiles to investigate the network structure of political microbloggers with respect to, first, their party preference and, second, the topics they discuss. We find that political microbloggers tend to follow like-minded peers. Microbloggers in a cohesive group tend to have the same political preferences. In addition, we conduct a content analysis of the political debate on Twitter to explore which topics and politicians are discussed and whether this debate reflects an ideological divide among participating users. While there are some discussion topics that are dominated by politically like-minded microbloggers, the majority of topics is discussed by a diverse group of microbloggers with various political preferences.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2011
PublisherAAAI Press
Pages474-477
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781577355052
StatePublished - 17 Jul 2011
Event5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2011 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: 17 Jul 201121 Jul 2011

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2011

Conference

Conference5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2011
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period17/07/1121/07/11

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